The badge drama at #WHY2025 was a low point in many ways. The community needs to learn from this.
Disclaimer: I do not know all the details of the backstory but the short version is: at some point the team working on the badge was rage quitting for some reasons and another team took over which resulted in a lot of stress.
While the original team was busy putting up schadenfreude-memes the new team tried to deliver on the overpromise that was the original badge design.
I keep wondering why there seems to be so much infighting with the dutch hacker community (the warehouse team responsible for dealing with collecting all the stuff at takedown after the event also rage-quitted on the last day of the event) instead of working together.
While there is not a lack of conflict in CCC-events the scene usually finds solutions not creating any bad blood.
However, the new badge team was apparently picking up the pieces trying to finish in time.
They kinda made it but they were late. Some got their badge only on the last day of the event, not sure if all promised devices could be delivered at all.
Things were bad because of a design flaw that probably happened because the original team dropped the ball. The device lacked some safety measures with open contacts so there was the possibility of the batteries creating potentially fire hazards.
So that was the main reason for the delay as all devices got an extra epoxy layer.
